The animal sleep laboratory has had an active year examining issues including the regulation of sleep, the pharmacology of anxiety and seizures, and approaches to growth hormone regulation. We previously reported that 3-hydroxy-methyl-beta-carboline, which binds to the benzodiazepine receptor and antagonizes the anxiolytic and anticonvulsant effects of diazepam, will induce dose-dependent increases in wakefulness and block the hypnotic actions of flurazepam. We have now given the tertiary butyl ester beta carboline (B-CCT), which is metabolized very slowly, and demonstrated a dose-dependent increase in wakefulness, the time course of which parallels receptor occupancy as measured in our laboratory. This provides further confirmatory evidence that the benzodiazepine receptor may play an important role in physiologic and pharmacologic sleep regulation. Another area of interest stems from the observation that drugs of very different pharmacologic classes may have behaviorally similar anxiolytic properties. In an effort to find some common mode of action, we hypothesized that the benzodiazepine receptor might play a role in the anxiolytic actions of barbiturates. Using Vogel's conflict test, we demonstrated that CGS 8216, a benzodiazepine antagonist, bloked the anxiolytic effects of pentobarbital. In other studies using the Vogel model, it was demonstrated that there are three type of effects on conflict procedures of drugs that bind to the benzodiazepine receptor: anticonflict effects of anxiolytic benzodiazepines, a pro-conflict effect of some beta carbolines, and antagonism of the other two effects by blockers such as CGS 8216 and RO 15-1788. Following up several years of human work on the relationship of sleep to growth hormone (GH) secretion, we studied the effects of sleep deprivation on the ability of GH to stimulate tissue growth (measured by amount of activity of ornithine decarboxylase). Preliminary results indicate that sleep and exercise affect not only the secretion of GH, but also its effectiveness in stimulating growth.